The Bisbee Deportation
Bisbee, Arizona, as with any town on the Wild West frontier, endured its share of outlawry, including murder. The most tragic even came early in its history. On Dec. 8, 1883, five men set out to rob the store that was the community’s de facto bank, believing the mining company’s payroll of many thousands of dollars was locked inside its massive safe. What started as an easy touch ended in tragedy for almost a dozen people.
At seven o’clock on that winter’s evening, the masked men walked into the Goldwater & Casteneda Store on Main Street, near where the library stands today, demanding cash and valuables. Both Joe Goldwater and A.A. Casteneda were present, as the bandits knew, and could open the safe. What they didn’t know was that the payroll had not yet arrived.
But this unanticipated time-consuming activity was costly. Two of the robbers were outside the store with rifles, and their presence — and the independent spirit of the camp’s denizens — soon led to gunplay.
How exactly it began was never clear, but in minutes, four citizens lay dead or dieing in the street, including a New Mexico peace officer who tried to intercede. The bandits were so spooked that one of them shot a woman who was peeking out of a restaurant door across the street. Both she and her unborn child would die.
Citizens returned fire, both then and minutes later as the five bandits were riding out of town, but no shot found its mark, save one, which grazed a jacket.
As the bandits rode out of town in one direction, one of those who had attempted to stop them, James Krigbaum, began a 22-mile ride through the moonlit night to Tombstone to rouse the sheriff. He made the journey in less than two hours — passing the stage carrying the Copper Queen payroll. But it wouldn’t be until the next morning that a posse set out from Bisbee under the leadership of Deputy Sheriff Billy Daniels.
Joining the men trailing the desperados was John Heath, who had just started a business in Bisbee. It wouldn’t be long before he was trying to persuade the others that the outlaws had headed north, perhaps to Tombstone. Daniels wasn’t convinced, however, and his men continued east across the valley toward the Chiricahuas. Heath and another man headed north. Daniels was correct in his tracking and soon came across the used-up horses of the robbers and a rancher who reported five stolen horses.
The trail led to another cabin, where a prospector not only had seen the robbers divvying up the loot, but named them and said he had seen them a week earlier, getting instruction from their leader — John Heath. Daniels sent the posse back to Bisbee to arrest Heath and he continued his pursuit.
The Copper Queen Mining Co. posted a reward and printed handbills describing the malefactors and their loot, distributing them throughout the Southwest and northern Mexico. The effort was successful. One robber was arrested just across the border in Deming, N.M. when his barber recognized him from a handbill.
Two others ended up back in Clifton, in eastern Arizona. One of the men had a girlfriend there, who, during his absence, had found a new lover. Not knowing that, he gave the girl a gold watch from the robbery and her new boyfriend recognized it from the handbill description. He gleefully informed local authorities, who arrested the man and his companion as they were cleaning their firearms. One wore the coat that had been grazed by a bullet back in the Bisbee gunfight.
Daniels then sought the last two desperados, who had fled to Mexico. He quickly followed one of them to a mine near Chihuahua City and easily arrested him. To avoid the red tape of extradition, he smuggled him out of Mexico in a railroad baggage car.
Then the only gang member still at large was William Delaney, considered the most dangerous. He could easily have disappeared into Mexico, but instead made the mistake of getting into a cantina brawl 300 miles south of the border. The handbills again did their job. Local authorities arrested him for fighting, sentencing him to 10 days in the local carcel, more than enough time for Cochise County deputies to arrive. Mexican police looked the other way as he, too, was quietly shipped across the border.
Within weeks, all six men involved in the Bisbee Massacre were in jail in Tombstone.
Their trial began Feb. 8, 1884, exactly two months after the grisly event. Evidence against the men was overwhelming. Writing almost a century later, Barry Goldwater, great nephew of the store owner, reported that during the trial, when Joe was called to be sworn by the bailiff, he held up both hands. “You only need to raise your right hand,” the bailiff said. “When I see those men,” Joe replied, pointing to the defendants, “I raise both hands.” On Feb. 19, the jury found the five men who were present on Main Street during the massacre guilty of first-degree murder. They were sentenced to hang on March 28.
To the surprise of almost everyone, including the judge in the trial, John Heath was found guilty only of second-degree murder. The judge thus could sentence him only to life in the Yuma Territorial Prison.
But Heath would never see prison. Citizens of Bisbee and Tombstone met, creating a committee named .44-60, after the popular rifle cartridge, and decided to take action they felt more befitting the organizer of the murder spree.
As day broke on Feb. 22, they gathered in Tombstone, broke into the jail, pushing jailers aside, and led Heath to his destiny. Sheriff Jerome Ward confronted the mob, but they disarmed him and continued with their plan.
On Toughnut Street, outside the Tombstone jail, they threw a rope over a telegraph pole. Heath coolly tied the white linen blindfold over his own eyes and requested that the lynch mob not riddle his body with gunshots as he hanged there. .44-60 complied with his final wish. Photographer C.S. Fly was present to record that part of the closure of the Bisbee Massacre.
Dr. George Goodfellow reported to the coroner’s jury: “. . . John Heath came to his death from imphysema of the lungs — a disease common in high altitudes — which might have been caused by strangulation, self-inflicted or otherwise.” The jury accepted his findings.
The story did not end with Heath’s hanging, however. A scaffold was erected for the hanging of the other five — Cochise County’s first official hanging. Sheriff Ward printed invitations for 50 citizens to witness this dispensation of justice. An entrepreneur erected grandstands nearby for those who didn’t get an invitation from the sheriff, selling tickets.
But Nellie Cashman, known as the “miners’ angel,” was outraged at the prospect of turning the hanging into a carnival, and in the pre-dawn hours before the event was to take place, some of her friends tore down the bleachers.
On schedule that March 28, the five desperados, Red Sample, Bill Delaney, Dan Kelly, Dan Dowd and Tex Howard, received their appointed justice. With Heath, they were buried in Tombstone’s Boot Hill.